17 May Marketing Audit
What is a marketing audit?
When someone says “audit”, the first thing that pops up in your mind is a financial audit. Companies are not focused on performing marketing audits or may not even know where to start. Furthermore, internal talent is inevitably influenced by performance and strategic bias to perform an audit of such capacity.
Although this is our secret sauce, we would like to share some critical steps in performing a marketing audit. At Mirable, we conduct an audit before drafting a marketing strategy. This necessary step ensures your marketing department will have the tools and knowledge to become a powerhouse, working towards overall business success.
Your Company
Looking at your company holistically and objectively is paramount. The exercise includes interviews, questions, documents, digging and analysis. The first step is outlining your current understanding of Services, SWOT, Assets, Business Goals, and Competitive Advantages. Often, there is an idea of what goals and advantages are, yet your current strategies are misaligned. Even worse, your marketing initiatives are deprived of strategic direction and follow an industry or company rut.
Budget
The marketing budget is usually a touchy topic. The reason for that is the lack of value-add strategies and understanding of how clients see it. We spend a considerate amount of time reviewing past and current plans and allocated dollars at the budget review stage.
Marketing Team and Roles
Budget, personnel and task efficiencies are part of the review as well. A marketing department has a fundamental gap when the right people with the right skills do the wrong tasks. Furthermore, the lack of proper skills and training or processes can hinder your team from delivering successful campaigns. The most common challenge is continuously running and reacting rather than stopping to think and execute.
Marketing Tools
We usually see considerable overspending for marketing tools or the lack of such. Management typically looks at tools somewhat sceptically and short-sightedly.
Many marketing tools provide automation, expansion and value add, which could help with managing marketing dollars and enhancing client services. Maybe you are not considering a CRM because it is expensive or you don’t have the right implementation team. Marketers use on average more than 12 different tools, and some use more than 31 tools to manage campaigns and data. In addition, add anywhere between 30% and 69% in extra manual labour.
When you add up the labour cost, it may surprise you that cheaper is not cheaper.
Some of the tools we recommend are listed below. Although, you may have them already, it is important to understand how you use them and are you duplicating efforts.
HubSpot– is probably one of the best marketing and sales CRM tools we have encountered. It seamlessly combines
HootSuite- is a robust social media marketing tool that allows your teams to collaborate and share assets, saving you time and yielding a greater understanding of your metrics.
MailChimp– depending on your database and goals for such, MailChimp could be used creatively to even ad-hoc a sales process.
Custom CMS- often we encounter clients with custom CMS solutions. Their email, website and social media are beautifully integrated, yet may be lacking some key elements from other tools. It is important to negotiate your snowflake design when buying a white label solution. To ask for the right solution, you need to know what’s right.
Next Steps
The following steps in our audit usually are Marketing Channels, Operating Plan and Business Goals, Brand Audit, and Key Business Partners and Vendors. Each of these is a complex matrix of interrelated components, and they each contribute to business continuity and success and play a pivotal role in sales and reputation.